Love Cursed Eternal
by midnightjen
Summary: just a short companion piece to my WIP Curse of Immortal Love


a/n: just finished my last exam for the semester. seven weeks holiday here i come! anyway this was a way to celebrate. just a short companion piece to Curse of Immortal Love. i hope you enjoy this!

**Love Cursed Eternal**

She likes to think it was hard, that trusting him was the most difficult thing she's ever had to do

She likes to think it was hard, that trusting him was the most difficult thing she's ever had to do. The truth is so much more than that because trusting him, really trusting him, was the easiest thing in the world. She likes to think that when she looks back over the last few years to point out the moment she realized that he had earned her trust that it was a point some time after they had left, after they had spent everyday together learning that trust. It didn't happen that way. Trusting him would always be about that moment, the moment when Dru's ashes settled on the floor and he looked broken. She would never forget the way his eyes shone bright with tears or the horrified look on his face when he realized what he had done. That was when she trusted him because he knew what she felt. He knew what it was like to kill the one you love. So, yeah, trusting him was dangerously simple. Loving him? Loving him was something else entirely.

She could remember the way he had turned to go and she had simply followed, she didn't even hesitate. They were already out of Sunnydale when he asked her why she was there. She found it funny that he never bothered to question the way his mortal enemy slid onto the front seat beside him or the easy silence that had descended over them until they left Sunnydale. She wasn't sure she really knew the answer to that but she was hurting and broken and she gave the only answer she could.

'Because we hurt.'

He never questioned her after that and they fell into an easy silence. When they reached LA he got them a room at a cheap motel and they spent an hour just lying on the bed staring at the stained ceiling. He asked her where she wanted to go, what she wanted to see. It never occurred to her that Spike was offering to show her the world. It didn't occur to him either. At least, not until the plane was taking off and he realized he was in for a ten hour flight with a heartbroken slayer. And he was a heartbroken vamp.

They learnt not to question it. If they addressed it then it would have to stop. As it was he showed her London and when they'd done that and she said she would love to see Paris he took her to Paris. They weren't stupid, they knew they were both running, from their pasts and their uncertain futures but that was okay. As long as they ran together and didn't have to hurt alone then that was okay.

Two months after they left he found himself watching her, smiling whenever she looked his way or showed excitement over some new place. He found himself studying her while she slept, the curve of her nose, the way she was growing into her curves. The first time he knew he was in trouble was when she saw something that reminded her of home and he did everything he could to make her smile. He knew he was in love when she got powdered sugar on her nose and he wanted nothing more than to hold her and lick it away. He told her one night in a little village on the Spanish border.

She said nothing and for the first night in months he went to bed a broken man.

She watched the way he withdrew; saw the way a little light had died in his eyes. It scared her because she had come to know him as such a happy and alive person. He still took her wherever she wanted to go, all she had to do was say the word and he would take her. But she couldn't shake the feeling that something had changed forever. She wasn't stupid; she saw the way he looked at her when he thought she wasn't looking. For a month he went to bed a broken man. He hid it well but she saw it in his every movement. It broke her just a little more each time to see someone so alive reduced to something so hollow.

He woke at dusk on a cold day in September to find her wrapped in his arms, just watching him sleep. When he looked at her in confusion she cupped his face and smiled shyly.

'Because I love you too and I don't like seeing you broken.'

They had their ups and downs and a crazy obsessed vampire following them around the world. Friends, demon and human, life, love and each other. And when she stepped out of the shower in their apartment in Istanbul and was cursed by a four foot elderly c'Kirah demon with what the Romanian's lovingly referred to as 'love cursed eternal' she welcomed it.

Because she loved Spike, she trusted Spike. Because he gave her the world when she had nothing and because she gave it in return.


End file.
